My great uncle made a Facebook call for the deportation of Chechens. I usually ignore his ultraconservative posts about guns and flags ect. but I nearly shat myself at this one.

I asked if we should have detained all white, male gun owners after sandy hook and colorado and he backed down. Some ahole friend of his started spouting off about "America for Americans" and "douching this country of people from terrorist places, terrorist religions and so on.."

It so stupid all around.

That kid looks like butter could melt in his mouth. I'm weirded out how they keep calling him a "man." He looks about three years younger than my former FWB, who was also 19.

Your great uncle probably abides by keeping things simple and stupid. Emphasis on the stupid.

Hey, kids, did you know that all social problems are attributable to narcissism?

No but things like killing innocent people for your own ego for no other reason than delusional ideology typically is. I can post multiple articles for you Professor Slea...Killjoy, on how they want to start profiling privileged white males for these particular crimes.

More than half of the cases involved school or workplace shootings (12 and 20, respectively); the other 30 cases took place in locations including shopping malls, restaurants, and religious and government buildings. Forty four of the killers were white males. Only one of them was a woman. (See Goleta, Calif., in 2006.) The average age of the killers was 35, though the youngest among them was a mere 11 years old. (See Jonesboro, Ark., in 1998.) A majority were mentally ill—and many displayed signs of it before setting out to kill.

Perhaps the greatest asset that unearned privilege conveys is the sense that public spaces “belong” to you. If you are—like James Holmes last week, or Charles Whitman, who killed 16 people on the University of Texas, Austin campus in 1966—an American-born, college-educated white man from a prosperous family, you don’t have a sense that any place worth being is off-limits to the likes of you. White men from upper middle-class backgrounds expect to be both welcomed and heard wherever they go. When that sense of entitlement gets frustrated, as it can for a host of complex psychological reasons, it is those same hyper-privileged men who are the most likely to react with violent, rage-filled indignation. For white male murderers from “nice” families, the fact that they chose public spaces like schools, university campuses, or movie theaters as their targets suggests that they saw these places as legitimately theirs.

The vast majority of white men from comfortable backgrounds don’t commit mass murder, of course. Our entitlement doesn’t manifest in the sense that public spaces are ours to terrorize, but it does show up in the confidence with which we move in those spaces. The certainty of belonging is at the core of our privilege.

Imagine if African American men and boys were committing mass shootings month after month, year after year. Articles and interviews would flood the media, and we’d have political debates demanding that African Americans be “held accountable.” Then, if an atrocity such as the Newtown, Conn., shootings took place and African American male leaders held a news conference to offer solutions, their credibility would be questionable. The public would tell these leaders that they need to focus on problems in their own culture and communities.

But when the criminals and leaders are white men, race and gender become the elephant in the room.

Nearly all of the mass shootings in this country in recent years — not just Newtown, Aurora, Fort Hood, Tucson and Columbine — have been committed by white men and boys. Yet when the National Rifle Association (NRA), led by white men, held a news conference after the Newtown massacre to advise Americans on how to reduce gun violence, its leaders’ opinions were widely discussed.

Unlike other groups, white men are not used to being singled out. So we expect that many of them will protest it is unfair if we talk about them. But our nation must correctly define their contribution to our problem of gun violence if it is to be solved.
When white men try to divert attention from gun control by talking about mental health issues, many people buy into the idea that the United States has a national mental health problem, or flawed systems with which to address those problems, and they think that is what produces mass shootings.

But women and girls with mental health issues are not picking up semiautomatic weapons and shooting schoolchildren. Immigrants with mental health issues are not committing mass shootings in malls and movie theaters. Latinos with mental health issues are not continually killing groups of strangers

In 31 of the school shootings that have taken place since 1999 [24], the murderers were all men. Out of the 62 mass murders which happened over the past 30 years [25], only one of those shooters was a woman. [26]The overwhelming majority of the gunmen were white.

“Imagine if 61 out of 62 mass killings were done by women? Would that be seen as merely incidental and relegated to the margins of discourse?” Katz asks, “No. It would be the first thing people talked about.”

In the U.S., where health care is privatized, it’s true that many people don't have adequate access to mental health services. Racial and ethnic minorities are even less likely to have access to health services [30], as well as, more generally the poor and unemployed. But not only are these mass shootings committed largely by white men, but by middle class white men. If this were primarily an issue of people not having access to mental health services, it would stand to reason that far more mass shootings would be perpetrated by poor minorities, particularly women of color [31].

But we’re talking white, middle class men -- the members of this society who have the most privilege and the most power. The question everyone should be asking is not: “Where did he get the gun?” or “Why wasn’t he on medication?” But: “What is happening with white men?” ...

“As a white man, the assumption is that you are the center of the world. Your needs should be met. You should be successful,” Katz says. When that doesn’t pan out men will often end up seeing themselves as victims. “This explains the cultural energy on the right in this past generation – so many of these men see themselves as victims of multiculturalism and of feminism,” he adds. “It’s undermining the cultural centrality of male authority.” Katz points out that we can see this worldview manifesting itself in the Men’s Rights Movement. “They are at the front line making the argument that men are the true victims.” All this isn’t to say that all men who feel they are losing grip on their perceived entitlement to power and authority will become perpetrators of mass shootings. But these broader patterns are something to consider.

@Magic Poriferan ...If that all doesn't point to a narcissistic sense of entitlement and frustrated two-year-old ego lashing out vengefully in violence (if I die, other people have to suffer and die too, and society will remember me!) as the primary motive I don't know what does.

Embarrassing. Yet unsurprising. Why am I surprised. Most of these people probably couldn't even point to France on a map.

Noting that some Americans seemed to be confused about where, exactly, the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings were from, Petr Gandalovič, the Czech Republic’s ambassador in Washington issued a statement on Friday explaining that Czechs and Chechens are entirely different people.

I'm not sure if it's nature or nurture but it seems like men are much more likely to be violent then women are. I'll take the privilege argument as "plausible", though I'd also pose a another line of reasoning: isolation and suburbia.

Who lives in the suburbs? Mostly white people. Men are more likely to kill people. So, white men doing crazy stuff. I'm not so sure that it's privilege or entitlement though, as much as the anonymity that suburbia creates. If you want to express yourself in the suburbs, you have to leave your anonymous house, get in your car, and go somewhere - a mall, an event. It's not like the city where you can just walk around and bump into people, or the country where you have your neighbors to chat with or chop up into pieces and keep in your freezer.

White men from upper middle-class backgrounds expect to be both welcomed and heard wherever they go. When that sense of entitlement gets frustrated, as it can for a host of complex psychological reasons, it is those same hyper-privileged men who are the most likely to react with violent, rage-filled indignation. For white male murderers from “nice” families, the fact that they chose public spaces like schools, university campuses, or movie theaters as their targets suggests that they saw these places as legitimately theirs.

So I'd question this 'suggestion', I think you can arrive at many conclusions, and my conclusion is not that people see the event as theirs, but they see it as a place to outlet. If anything, I think that these people probably feel a distinct lack of ownership over these public spaces.

I do think it's true that people who aren't used to not getting everything (or getting things a certain set way) do freak out when things are different.

I think that particular entitlement explanation is in vogue, and while I do think that people should at least be familiar with the concepts (and look for examples in their own lives), I'm hesitant to jump on board with that whole line in cases we've seen recently.

I'm not sure yet if this incident even fits into recent massacres in the same way as the others, really.

A lot of them aren't "alienated" but narcissists with a sense of entitlement. School shootings and acts like this are actually typically performed by privileged middle class white males, not unlike serial killers. Sure, there's the Asian guy, but lots of Asian families are also upper middle class, and in the U.S. Asians are usually unfairly held above other minorities as being "special" or "smarter" or "equal to/better than whites" or something.

I'll link the article if you'd like, but a lot of it actually has to do with acting out on a sense of entitlement. Enraged ego, all that garbage.

I do like your comparisons of U.S. to Russia, though, I've seen that since before the Cold War ended, like two sides of the same coin, some kind of bizarre evil twinerry or something. Salt and pepper.

Narcissism as I understand it is a facet of alienation.

I tend to think of alienation not as a feeling, idea or sentiment experienced but a deterministic phenomenon of which most people are not aware and there are limits to the control people can exercise over it even when the awareness exists.

Its in no way a sympathetic observation to suggest that they were alienated btw.

In other news, I spend over $15K a year on rent, but if someone were to steal 100 bucks from me, I'd lose my shit.

Your comparison would only make sense if the $15k was also stolen from you.

I made that statement for perspective because humans are irrational and too easily trade freedom for security. We've already done it with the Patriot Act. CISPA (a "revised" version) was just passed by the House, so there goes more freedom down the toilet. Every time something "scary" happens (or we're told it could happen), people expect our incompetent government to stop it from happening ever again. But they can't stop things like this from happening without taking away all freedom. Dealing with events like these is the cost of living in a free society.

"We grow up thinking that﻿ beliefs are something to be proud of, but they're really nothing but opinions one refuses to reconsider. Beliefs are﻿ easy. The stronger your beliefs are, the less open you are to growth and wisdom, because "strength of belief" is only the intensity with which you resist questioning yourself. As soon as you are proud of﻿ a belief, as soon as you think it adds something to who you are, then you've made it a part of your ego."